“I have a phone. Though perhaps young people these days don’t use such outdated technology.”
“What I want to ask you is better done in person.”
“That sounds portentous. Come on then, don’t keep me in suspense. What do you want?”
She didn’t speak immediately, her mouth tightening, her eyes narrowing. As if she was steeling herself for something.
Jesus, whatever it was it had better be good. He had shit to do.
After a brief, silent moment, Lily walked up the steps, coming to stand in front of him. The light coming from the club’s doorway shone directly on her face. She wore no makeup, her skin white, almost translucent and gleaming with freckles like little specks of gold. She looked sixteen if she was a day.
“Can I come in? I don’t want to ask you out here.”
“What, into the club? Sorry, love, but it’s members only.”
She shifted restlessly on her feet. “So can I be a member then?”
“Are you kidding? You think I just hand out membership to any fool that comes to my door?”
Her forehead creased into a scowl. “I’m not a fool.”
“If you’re not a fool, then you’ll understand that there’s a reason it’s taken me three days to speak to you.”
“I just want to ask you a question. Nothing else.”
“Then send me an e-mail or a text like any normal teenager. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a few things I—”
“I’m not a teenager, for Christ’s sake. And what I want to talk to you about is…personal.”
Kahu leaned against the doorframe, eyeing her. “If it’s personal then why aren’t you talking to your dad or a friend or whatever? You hardly know me.”
Rob had been Anita’s lawyer as well as her friend. Kahu had met him in the context of dinners, where Anita had brought Kahu along and he’d sat there silently at the table while she and Rob talked, unable to join in because he didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about—the dumb, uneducated Maori kid from the streets.
Sometimes at those dinners Lily had been there, a small seven-year-old with big eyes, whom he’d ignored mainly because she was a child and he had nothing to say to a privileged white kid from Remuera, born with a silver spoon in her mouth.
Then, after he’d come back from overseas and had reconnected with Rob over the management of the Auckland Club, he’d sometimes see her as he talked business with her father. A slender teen with a sulky mouth, who appeared to lurk permanently in the hallway whenever he arrived or left, big gray-green eyes following him when she thought he wouldn’t notice.
She’d grown up a bit since then, the rounded features of adolescence morphing into the more defined lines of adulthood. But that mouth of hers was still sulky and she was still small and slender. And her eyes were still wide and big as they met his.
“Yeah, I realize that. But…” She shifted again, nervous. “What I want to ask concerns you in particular.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Me, huh? Well, spit it out then.”
A crowd of people came up the steps behind her, laughing and talking. Kahu moved out of the way as they approached the door, greeting them all by name and holding out his arm to usher them inside.
Once they’d all gone in, he turned back to Lily, who remained standing there with her hands in the pockets of her coat, glaring at him almost accusingly.
He could not, for the life of him, work out what her problem was, but one thing was for sure: he was getting bloody sick of standing there while she continued to dance around the subject.
“Okay,” he said, glancing at his watch. “You’ve got ten seconds. If you haven’t told me what you’re doing here by then, I’m going to go inside and ring your father, and ask him to come and get you.”
“All right, Jesus,” Lily muttered. “You don’t have to be such a dick about it.”
Kahu refrained from rolling his eyes. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…”
She turned her head, looking back down the steps, clearly checking to make sure there was no one around.
“…six, five, four, three—”
“I was kind of wondering if you could perhaps seduce me.”
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Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
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Bound to be Tested
Copyright © 2015 by Becca Jameson
ISBN: 978-1-61922-500-8
Edited by Christa Soule
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First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: January 2015
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Bound to be Tested: Emergence, Book 3 Page 26